


Seeing With The Heart

by 1f_this_be_madness



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M, Tony becomes a college professor for real, spoilers through NCIS Season 12, takes place after the conclusion of the NCIS show--whenever that may be
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-08
Updated: 2015-10-08
Packaged: 2018-04-25 09:57:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4955908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1f_this_be_madness/pseuds/1f_this_be_madness
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It has been years since Tony DiNozzo has fired a gun, run down leads, or put out a BOLO. He is now a professor at a college near D.C. and has at last trained himself not to constantly think of and wonder about Ziva. Almost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seeing With The Heart

It has been years since Tony DiNozzo has picked up a gun, called out a bolo, or run down leads. Even since he’s had any Gibbs slaps {for the lack of those he is very thankful}. He still remembers what those things feel like, though. All of it painful and sharp yet so crisp and clear: when he followed a lead or McGee tapped into a suspect’s phone or Ziva…he pauses after thinking her name. It has been a while since he’s thought it or said it aloud. Having it come to his mind now is enough to make his eyes prickle and he feels a lump in his throat even though he swore to himself that he would stop doing that. Yet he is still wondering what might have been, if she had come back to D.C. with him, if he could have fought harder—before making the hardest 180 of his life—for her to understand that she was a good person. She may have done bad things, but killing Ari was not one of them.

“Ziva,” he says with a shudder of sadness, hands coming up to squeeze the sides of his desk. His head drops for just a moment in a kind of defeat. It would have been longer, except—

“Um, Mr. DiNozzo? Professor? Are you okay?” Tony’s head snaps up and back to the present as he looks up to see one of his students, a wide-eyed blonde girl named Marissa, leaning slightly toward him in concern. “The last bell just rang,” She adds apologetically. Right. Time for class to start. Tony clears his throat and smooths his tie before giving her a dashing DiNozzo smile. Yup, he’s still got it, the pop culture professor thinks as the girl blushes slightly.

“Thanks, Marissa. You get a gold star for the day. Time for class to begin!” Tony strides into the center of the lecture hall, spreading his arms after hitting his desk with a POW and whipping his head back and forth, a ritual he’d started at NCIS whenever he had said or done something really impressive—at least by his own personal standards. There is a snicker from one of the tiers in the mid-back, but Tony doesn’t care. He is in full theatre mode. “Dramatic DiNozzo,” McGee would probably say with pursed lips and rolling eyes. Abby would just grin and give him a double thumbs-up, while Gibbs would be in the back shaking his head and trying not to smile. Ducky and Vance, meanwhile, would both be chuckling, and poor Autopsy Gremlin Palmer wouldn’t get it. Ziva—she would be there with her legs crossed and arms folded over her chest, that long hair bouncing in a high ponytail the way he liked, attempting to be disapproving yet nevertheless amused, warmth lighting up her dark eyes. Ahem—here we go; he has to continue this class without remaining in the past. 

“Welcome, Initiates, to the Jedi Temple, where you will be instructed in the ways of the Force,” he intones. “In other words, you’re gonna learn about the place movies have occupied in popular culture since the inception of the first film reels in the 1890s all the way to the thousands of post-apocalyptic and super-hero flicks that have come out in recent years. I am your teacher, Very Special Professor Anthony DiNozzo—big D little i big N little o-z-z-o, just so you remember how to spell it.” He rubs his hands together and grins, ready to get the ball rolling. “Now, what are some of your favorite movie quotes?” There is silence. A few throat clearings and paper rustlings but no voices. Finally, Marissa tentatively raises her hand. Tony expects something a la The Notebook, so he is duly surprised (and impressed) when she blurts out:

“’You are no longer David Webb. From now on, you will be known as Jason Bourne.’”

“Excellent! The Bourne Trilogy is a fantastic trio of movies. And then there was The Bourne Legacy, but we’ll talk about that later. Great choice, Marissa. You get another gold star,” he smiles at her. “All right, are there any more?” Several people blurt out in succession,

“‘It’s Goh-jirah, you moron!’” Godzilla  
This makes Tony want to shudder, but he restrains himself. Besides Matthew Broderick, who is stupidly likable in every role he’s ever been in, that was one shitty movie.

“’It doesn’t matter if something is true; if you wanna believe in something, believe in it!’” Secondhand Lions

“’Are you talkin’ to me??’” Taxi Driver

“’Here’s looking at you, kid.’” Casablanca

“‘You’re my friend.’ ’YOU’RE MY MISSION!!!’ ‘Then finish it, because I’m with you to the end of the line.’” Captain America: the Winter Soldier

And then students start getting into the book-to-movie adaptations:  
“’What do stars do? Shine!!!’” Stardust

“’It is our choices that tell us who we are, far more than our abilities.’” Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“’Katniss! Remember who the REAL enemy is!!!’” Catching Fire

And then, from the middle of the room,  
“’It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.’” That voice makes Tony freeze. He thought he would never hear it again.

“’What is essential is invisible to the eye,’” He intones quietly. “The Little Prince. My mother took me to see that.”

“It is also, I have heard,” comes the same voice in a light, teasing tone, “quite an extraordinary book.” Tony feels like his heart has stopped. He sweeps his eyes across the tiers of seats and there she is. A few rows up and just to the left of dead center. Her hair is up in a high ponytail, just as he remembers loving it, her eyes warm and bright yet slightly unsure as she locks them on his. “Tony,” she mouths after what seems like an eternity, “you’re startling your students.” He blinks and unfocuses his eyes from her face. Ziva’s face. She is here, this is real, and she’s back again. He can’t think. His heartbeat is buzzing, deafening and crinkling his inner ears as he breathes deeply to get himself back into professor mode. 

“Good. Right on the money, miss—” Tony’s pause hangs in the air, because he isn’t sure whether he should bow to protocol in this instance, though he knows her so well, has known her for years, has hoped desperately that she would find herself again and then, maybe, impossibly, come to find him. And at last, after he thought he’d at last conditioned himself not to think her name and scan his eyes around the D.C. streets for her whenever he walked to get a cup of coffee with McGee—who was now working as a computer analyst for some big company and whose wife was pregnant with another baby—and just when he congratulated himself on inevitably, finally moving on, here she was.

“David,” says that voice of hers, rich with amusement. “Ziva David.”

“Ziva,” His lips form her name in almost a caress. “An Israeli name. You’re back from Israel?” He says the first sentence for his students’ benefit, and adds the rest because he can’t help it. He has to know if she’s here just to see him briefly or if she has come back to the States for good.

“I am back, yes. It took me a while…” to find myself, her eyes add, a depth of profound sorrow in them but groundedness too, so different from the last time they’d laid eyes on each other. “To find this lecture room,” she adds aloud. There are several snickers and someone whispers to her,

“It’s called a lecture hall.” Ziva is confused; adorably so.

“But—this is not a hallway. It is a room, with chairs and tables and a blackboard and—” she throws up her hands in frustration. “Sometimes I still hate this language. No matter how long I have been speaking it there is always SOMEthing I do not understand!”

**Author's Note:**

> My thanks to the greatness that is NCIS, despite the fact that its writers don't seem to like allowing characters to be--and remain--happy all that much. Hence, why I wrote this.
> 
> Thanks also to Michael Weatherley and Cote de Pablo for having such a wonderful friendship on- and offscreen. 
> 
> I must also thank Antoine de Saint-Exupery for writing a little book about a little prince that has touched millions of people in multiple languages.


End file.
